Golgotha and the Crucifixion, from the series "The Chicago Panorama of The Crucifixion"

Art Historical Context

Henry Hamilton Bennett’s *Golgotha and the Crucifixion* (1893) is a stereoscopic albumen print that captures a dramatic religious panorama exhibited during Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. Bennett, renowned for his innovative landscape photography in the American Midwest, here turned his camera toward a monumental painted or sculpted scene of Christ’s crucifixion. The stereo format—two nearly identical images mounted side by side—allowed viewers to experience the composition in three dimensions when seen through a stereoscope, a popular parlor entertainment of the era. The work belongs to Bennett’s series “The Chicago Panorama of The Crucifixion,” which documented one of the fair’s most ambitious religious spectacles. Albumen prints on small cards like this one were inexpensive, portable, and widely collected, bringing grand public displays into private homes. By translating a vast, immersive panorama into intimate stereo views, Bennett helped democratize both religious imagery and the experience of the World’s Fair itself. Today the photograph offers a rare glimpse into late-nineteenth-century visual culture, where new photographic technologies met longstanding traditions of devotional art. Its modest scale belies the sweeping ambition of the original panorama and underscores photography’s growing role as both document and spectacle.

About the Artist

Henry Hamilton Bennett · 1843–1908

Henry Hamilton Bennett (1843–1908) was a pioneering American photographer whose breathtaking images of the Wisconsin Dells transformed a rugged river gorge into one of the nation's premier tourist destinations. Born in Farnham, Quebec, Canada, on January 15, 1843, Bennett moved with his family to Brattleboro, Vermont, before settling in Kilbourn City (now Wisconsin Dells), Wisconsin, in 1857 at ag...